“Who won?”

You can talk about the vice presidential debate all you want. I skipped it. And this morning I tried to find out what was said, and all I see is the media arguing about “who won”, which I don’t give a good goddamn about. Did we learn anything about policies? At the end of the debate, shouldn’t we have a clearer idea about what the candidates stand for, and isn’t that what the media should be talking about?

Instead, all I hear about is that Pence “looked” “presidential”, two rather meaningless words.

Jebus. Now the right-wingers are arguing about the flair the two were wearing. Pence wore the obligatory American flag pin, while Kaine wore a mysterious and almost certainly insidious furrin pin of some kind.

Can we just declare that anyone who doesn’t know what the Blue Star service symbol means isn’t qualified to pontificate on military matters in the US?

Please sit down and shut up, Gary Johnson

He has a new excuse for his ignorance of foreign policy matters: being stupid is an asset.

It’s because we elect people who can dot the I’s and cross the T’s on the name of a foreign leader or a geographic location, then allows them to put our military in harm’s way.

Jebus. We’ve already forgotten George W. Bush, who hadn’t the vaguest idea of the organization of the region he happily invaded?

I understand that the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region.

You don’t even want to know how confused he was about Latin America.

So no, Gary Johnson, the fact that you don’t know how to find your own ass with a mirror, a theodolite, and a butt-plug with built-in GPS does not imply that you are incapable of hip-checking someone while you’re floundering about trying to figure out what you’re doing with our military.

I hear that women are made of exotic matter

The Nobel in Physics has been awarded for research on exotic matter, but I think you’d be better off looking for a physicist to explain it. I’m sure it’s good work and that the three scientists are deserving, but I just have to leave this fact on the table.

No Nobel Prize has come close to being equitably distributed by gender, but physics has the worst record of them all. Zero women have won it in the past 50 years. Exactly two women have won it ever.

Again, this does not detract from the accomplishments of Thouless, Haldane, and Kosterlitz, but it does make one wonder how much further physics would have progressed if it didn’t have a culture that discouraged half of humanity from participating.

Can I come in and tell you about the cult of Danio?

Now I know how a Mormon or Scientologist or Baptist feels when some heathen tries to earnestly explain their religion. This video is well done, but gives me a bit of the heebie-jeebies.

I started working on zebrafish in 1979 (I wasn’t the first, or even particularly close — that honor goes to the crew in George Streisinger’s lab), and all through the 80s our lab group had a reputation: at every meeting in every talk, we’d recite what was called the Zebrafish Litany, a listing of all the virtues of this quirky new model organism that nobody else knew much about. In fact, at the Friday Harbor lab meetings in developmental biology there was a kind of tradition where the students would linger in the auditorium late at night and mock the speakers and professors with imitations on the podium, and one year a group made fun of us by having a series of students march robotically to the lectern and recite the exact same series of words. And those words are in this video. How dare the unbelievers speak our catechism!

The video doesn’t quite capture the true nature of the Cult of Danio, though. Everything in it is about how zebrafish research contributes to the study of human diseases, which is a nice perk of the system, but we study the fish because the fish are fascinating, not because we are wannabe human disease researchers. Also, the part where he explains the flaws of the zebrafish, that they have many duplicated genes (so do we) and that they have unique genes not found in humans? Those aren’t flaws.

It is nice to see, though, that our orison is now part of the general public awareness of the zebrafish. That’s why we were saying it so often. Soon, you too shall be a believer. All praise George!

Spooky evolved powers!

The Alien Disclosure group has discovered an alien starchild living in China with amazing powers. They have proof. It’s on video.

Ooh, spooky. His eyes aren’t brown! I bet you didn’t know that blue eyes give you the power to see in the dark, did you?

The description of this kid is pretty silly, too.

In the Chinese city Dahua lives child of a new human race. Little Nong Yousui has blue eyes with a deep neon glow in the dark just like the cat’s eye effect.

NONG YOUSUI CAN SEE IN THE DARK AS MUCH AS WE CAN SEE IN THE LIGHT

Such eyes are a familiar sight even for the inhabitants of the Nordic lands. The boy can see in the dark as we can see in the light.

Yes. We Nordics are familiar with the neon glow of our eyes. We have to wear blindfolds to bed so that the glare doesn’t keep are partners awake. We also have a tapetum, just like a cat.

Let’s bring the Science to bear.

After his teacher shared these unusual abilities on the internet, suspicious reporters from Beijing decided to check out the information with specialists. They concluded from a variety of tests and experiments including DNA analysis and chromosonal defragmentation, none of which hurt the boy, that indeed he had ‘evolved’ genes. Little Nong is the first living man that can see in the dark.

According to some specialists, it is not a random change. Namely, this change isn’t a mutation consequence but more of an evolution consequence.

How do you tell a mutated gene from an evolved one?

I’d also like to try defragmenting my chromosomes, especially since they say it doesn’t hurt.

Hate doesn’t pay, but it can be subsidized

Jim Rutenberg is concerned about the flood of hate speech that’s been accelerating over the last few years. He has examples, including himself — I guess you shouldn’t use Twitter if you have an obviously Jewish name. Or a woman’s name. Or a black name. It’s a medium that’s only safe for us True Aryan Males, I guess, and that’s a problem that’s affecting their bottom line.

Now that Twitter is contemplating putting itself up for sale, we can only wonder what lucky suitor is going to walk away with such a charming catch.

Twitter is seeking a buyer at a time of slowing subscriber growth (it hovers above the 300 million mark) and “decreasing user engagement,” as Jason Helfstein, the head of internet research at Oppenheimer & Company, put it when he downgraded the stock in a report last week.

There’s a host of possible reasons for this, including new competition, failure to adapt to fast-changing media habits and an “open mike” quality that some potential users may find intimidating.

But you have to wonder whether the cap on Twitter’s growth is tied more to that most basic — and base — of human emotions: hatred.

Yes. I suspect the answer is “HELL YES.” Twitter might look to their competition, 4chan, which is also experiencing problems and might be up for sale.

All good things must come to an end and as it stands now, 4chan will probably be gone before the end of the month. Or at least several of its boards will.

Ever since 4chan was sold by Christopher Poole (Moot) to Hiroyuki Nishimura about a year ago, the new owner has come to realize that paying several millions of dollars for an anonymous image board probably wasn’t a very good idea. 4chan is good for trolling, raiding, shit-posting and doing basically anything, it just isn’t a good business venture. No corporate brand wants to advertise their products on a website where users nonchalantly joke about rape, death and every other politically incorrect topic you can think off. Even as owner of 4chan, Moot has stated several times that 4chan was in several ways, a liability. It costs more to maintain the site than the revenue generated from it.

Heh. Surprise!

But don’t cry for 4chan. There might be a white knight riding to the rescue. Martin Shkreli. They belong together.

The problem is that we have advocated free speech, as in free from all responsibility, rather than free speech, as in free of political and economic restrictions. We want a medium where Exxon and North Korea don’t get to control what people say about them, but instead we have a medium where racists and misogynists and shitlords get to abuse everyone, and we don’t yet have a tool that strikes a balance between permitting criticism and permitting open hatred, or even between truth and lies. I’ve been watching the growth of so-called “satire” sites that follow the rule of anything goes — you can lie in a clumsy, ugly way about anyone or anything if you slap a “satire” label on it — and I’m not the only one who finds them to be a threat to the integrity of information on the net.

It is easy to be a free-speech fundamentalist. I’ve been one as long as I can remember without ever breaking a mental sweat. It requires belief in only two basic tenets, the one more feel-good than the other: that people are essentially decent and smart, and that truth always wins over lies in the long run.

The internet has proven both to be wrong. Social media shows that people are essentially a mob of thoughtless arseholes, and the “post-truth” political era shows that the dark side is, in fact, the more powerful.

The dark side is only more powerful if we uncouple free speech from incentives for honest speech, which is the status quo right now.

Unfortunately, that’s a very hard problem, and there is no easy solution. It is, however, easy to see that the balance is totally out of whack right now.